A Virtual Attendee of NECC 2008

I never expected to take part in NECC 2008. It was good fortune that a few months ago I came across a K12 Online Conference presentation from 2007, where Jeff Utecht was spontaneously contacting educators on Twitter and using Skype to interview them as part of his webcast. I’d learned about Twitter in 2007, but didn’t think much of it until I saw Jeff so casually use it to connect to a wide network of education professionals. That’s when the light bulb flicked on in my head, and since then my personal learning network (PLN) has grown as I’ve added educators from all across the world.
I was able to follow the online activity when the other Twitterers were talking about the Google Teacher Academy and TIE 2008, but the community excitement reached a peak when NECC was approaching. What a great opportunity this proved to be! Never before has there been the means to such an extensive and easily-accessible network that created numerous learning opportunities. Amid the swarm of tweeting, liveblogs, and chat sessions, I enjoyed conversations with other educators, whether they were present at NECC or not. NECC itself was the catalyst for the flow of online discussions in liveblogs and backchannels while presentations were being streamed, and my PLN more than doubled during the conference. I was introduced to many interesting, insightful, and innovative teachers. I’m a newcomer to the online educational community, and have only been actively using Twitter a few months, but at no time did I feel out of place. I connected with people who shared similar goals.
On the downside, I wasn’t able to participate in the other group meetings at NECC. I couldn’t attend EduBloggerCon, or sit in the Bloggers’ Cafe and enjoy thoughtful conversations. Honestly, I probably would have been too starstruck and googoo-eyed from meeting, in a single place, all the bloggers and educational professionals from the web that I’ve come to respect — everyone would have wondered, just who WAS that weird guy drooling over himself in the corner? But it would have been nice to be at the Twitter/EduBlogger dinner, sharing stories and making friends.
I missed out on plenty of the people I could have met. I missed the synergy that comes from face-to-face social networking. The face-to-face aspect is as much a part of the professional connecting as anything. And I missed meeting those who might not have blogs, don’t use Twitter, and don’t connect online. This alone would have made NECC worthwhile. At the same time, I hope that after this conference these same people I missed will be inspired to use these technologies more, and with any luck I’ll see them online soon enough.
I feel my takeaways were significant. The backchannels were a great asset. They were swarming with links, and links are inherently easier to share online than in a face-to-face presentation. I can simply click the link as its presented by a liveblogger or tweeter. If I were sitting in the classroom, I’d have to manually type in the link to view it on my laptop, assuming the laptop’s battery hadn’t died for the day.
What improvements could be made? One problem I see is that the educators who would benefit from an online conference experience are the very ones who may be clueless about how to participate in it. I’m not really prepared to explain to teachers that to virtually attend a conference they should follow this wiki or that wiki, use Summize to find the #necc or #necc2008 hash tags, follow these Twitter users, go to this Ustream or Mogulus feed, follow such-and-such liveblog, and so on. It’s exhausting! I deduced that the NECC Live wikispace was kind of the central hub for all online NECC information, but often I wouldn’t see live streams mentioned until they had already begun and were several minutes into the presentation. Although my Twitter network exploded during the conference, I sometimes simply missed tweets to the live streams. I usually retweeted stream links in case others were having the same problem.
Ideally (and perhaps unrealistically), here’s what I would like to see in the future.

• I should be able to give educators a single web site, be it a wiki or whatever, at least one week in advance, listing the URL to  every:
  • live stream
  • live chat
  • archived stream and chat
• The site should also contain links to users who will be liveblogging about the conference. Granted, many livebloggers may not plan on doing a liveblog ahead of time, but when they do the site should automatically update with this information, preferably without any extra effort on the part of the liveblogger.
• The site should be organized in an orderly fashion, so users aren’t hunting through links and don’t have to guess what to click on next.

I have yet to figure out how all this would be accomplished.